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What Two Years in Nonprofit Tech Has Taught Me (If Anything)
10:16 AM Mar 02, 2007
Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of my first day at DemocracyInAction, and it got me reflecting on the many strange and wonderful things I've learned, from the many strange and wonderful fellow-inmates of the nonprofit tech asylum. I came by the nonprofit tech space quite accidentally, as happens to many in it -- development (fundraising, not tech development) turned accidental owner of a web site turned e-pamphleteer turned buyer/user/customer evangelist of scrappy startup do-gooders turned employee of aforementioned scrappy startup do-gooders. I've been learning on the fly since those first stomach-fluttering support calls, and with luck a few of those lessons were even the right ones. At any rate, these are a few of the dominant delusions I'm nursing as a result:
Nonprofit tech isn't always that much about the tech.
Though the dream lives on for a legion of cybertopians, the technology has not yet been invented to patch inefficient management, political rivalry, personal jealousy, or any laws of thermodynamics. Apparent dysfunctions in hardware, software and handlers of same very often turn out to express the personal or institutional dynamics that surround them, and those dynamics have been powerful enough at times to cause an organization to switch to us or from us for what amount to reasons wholly unrelated to us.It's also not that much about nonprofits.
Nonprofit, at the end of the day, is a paragraph of the tax code. For a million-plus organizations that run the gamut from Miriam's Kitchen to Yale University to the American Enterprise Institute to, well, DemocracyInAction, one presumes upon the connotative implications of the term at one's peril. At the same time, and especially in the age of networks and connectivity, individuals and ad hoc networks of people are taking on many of the functions of advocacy and service traditionally associated with nonprofits, and good in the world doesn't ultimately care whether it was done by someone with an IRS determination letter. Nonprofit organizations, in their many forms, guises and functions, are much more similar to for-profits, to cliques, to blog clusters, to political parties, to military units, and to a host of other recognizable organizational structures than sectarian exceptionalism might incline to confess. As is usual in human affairs, there's more variation within groups than between them. And there's a lot to be gained cribbing the lessons learned in other parts of the tax code.One can be a hacker at any level of technical acumen.
It's a little too easy for many of us who are not particularly technical to accept a learned dependence on programming staff or consultants. This was a habit I had to rather violently break when I arrived here, acting as the layer between customer calls and our CTO. It turns out that taking a dogged approach to technical problems -- acting like one has no programmer to fall back on and starting with one's own expertise, whatever it is, googling to enhance it, experimentally replicating bugs and testing possible solutions -- can actually get one pretty far down the road, quite often all the way down the road, and build one's own knowledge into the bargain. And I'll let you in on a secret: a fair portion of the time that the geeks get ahold of a problem, that's exactly what they're doing. They just strike that authoritative pose when they deliver the response to keep the normals in awe. It's an amazingly empowering experience that largely hinges on mindset. For better or worse, it's also the sort of thing to make accidental techies if you're the one person in an office willing to figure out troublesome printer networking or unpack HTML.There are many paths to enlightenment.
(Gonnnnnng ... and we don't even have a Berkeley office.) Seriously, I wouldn't be here if I didn't think DemocracyInAction generally rocks your socks. "The zeal of the converted," I think I said. But there's missionary work, and there's crusade by swordpoint. We try to do our proselytizing with a slice of humility, both to keep karma satisfied and because the brief history of the Internet is already littered with the ruined statuary of a thousand Prester Johns fallen from the holiest of V.C. holies into the obscurity of abandoned code and Aeron fire sales. The fact is that the market is made of organizations who need technology like ours as a means to a tactical goal, and that a variety of possible solutions exist that might realize it. We hope ours is often among the more cost-effective and accessible for a certain class of organizations and goals. But there is no such thing as one code fits all. Update: Get this post remixed into video in an amazingly flattering shout-out.
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